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By Root 836 0

private terrors. She would still go to the school gates and often she’d be waiting there until the entire school had left Littsen Street and the gates were even closed up for the night, and still she wouldn’t have seen us because neither I nor Irva would have gone to school all that day. And then more and more often Grandfather would be waiting at home when we finally returned, me first and then Irva always a few minutes behind, always with such a strange expression on her face. Grandfather would try to frighten us with gloomy predictions of our future lives and sometimes we’d be shown letters from school and sometimes a teacher would come and I’d hear Mother saying, ‘I don’t understand them … they barely talk to me anymore … they won’t talk to me.’ But I didn’t care about all those people. They were merely Entrallans. They didn’t count.

ON THE STATION steps I showed August the extraordinary piece of paper I had ripped from a library book when no one was looking, just for him. Grand Central Station, New York, more like a palace than a train station. But the cerulean blue ceiling, that was the most beautiful thing, spotted with the celestial globe. The stars, all the signs of the zodiac, but not just the stars, many of which were lit up by tiny bulbs, there were also outlines of the people and the things the stars were named after. Then August had his idea: ‘Why don’t we paint the stars on the ceiling of our train station?’ ‘Do you think we could?,’ I asked. He said, ‘I don’t see why not.’ ‘Wouldn’t they stop us, surely they would.’ ‘Not if they don’t know, not if we paint it at night when the station’s closed and locked up.’

That night, when the station was cleared, when the station gates were bolted, August and I arrived holding a pot of white emulsion paint and two brushes. There was a small side gate and then a turnstile, which we climbed over. And then we were inside the train station. And so our work could begin. We climbed way up a metal ladder bolted onto the wall and we sat with our feet dangling on one of the metal girders that supported the ceiling. It was like sitting on the ribs of a huge man, a great skeleton made of iron. We were alone in the station, it felt like alone in the world, only me and August and the pigeons trying to sleep. There was so much mess on those metal rafters, soot and dirt and rust and the pigeons had claimed them as if they were built for them alone; there were feathers and shit everywhere. We carefully stood up, balancing ourselves with one another, we took our paint brushes and using the photograph of that famous ceiling in New York as our guide we began to paint. The paint went everywhere, dripped all over us, dripped on the pigeons’ shit, dripped on the pigeons, as if it were our own shit and we, much bigger birds, were shitting on them. It dripped all the way down to the station hall too, we heard it fall, sounds that seemed to us like a bum being smacked (a warning, perhaps, of what was to come). August’s coat had great streaks down it, and so did his hair and so did his face. The station ceiling wasn’t easy to paint, it was so filthy up there that the paint had to be laid on thickly or no marks would be made, and the brushes soon became gunked up. Our constellations weren’t accurate. They were too bunched up and all in a tiny part of the station ceiling. But, all the same, we were very proud of our work.10

We were up there for perhaps an hour, possibly more, maybe two, moving carefully between the metal ribbing, positioning white dots. It would probably have been better if one of us had stayed down below and called out directions, since once back on the hall floor we could see just how inaccurate our daubing was. But I’m glad we were both up there, there was something so good about getting dirty together. When we did finally descend exhausted, we stood in the centre of the hall, looking up at our non-fluorescent stars, visible only because of the lights of the lavatory signs and the Coca Cola machines which were always lit up, and looking down at the mess we’d made on the floor.